Where does a PDF's author name come from?

By Check Before Send · Updated 13 October 2026

From the program that made the PDF. The PDF standard has an optional Author entry in the file's document information, and the program that writes the PDF decides whether to fill it. In our test, Word copied the Word file's Author property into it, and that property held Word's own user name when nobody had typed an author.

So a PDF can name a person you never meant to name. This guide shows what the standard defines, what Word wrote in our tests, and how to leave the name out.

What the PDF standard defines

The PDF standard, as published by Adobe, describes a "document information dictionary" with a short list of entries, most of them optional in the version we read: Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator, Producer, CreationDate and ModDate, plus a flag about trapping that is not relevant here.

The standard defines Author as the name of the person who created the document. Creator is the product that made the original document, if the file was converted from another format. Producer is the product that converted it to PDF. The two dates record when the document was created and last modified.

The standard says what each entry means; it does not say where a program should get the value from. That is up to the program.

What Word wrote in our tests

We ran this on Microsoft Word 2016 on Windows, with invented names. We exported each document with Word's own export function and the "include document properties" setting on, which is the same setting as the "Document properties" box in Word's PDF options. We read the result back with a PDF reader library.

What we did in Word	Author in the PDF
Typed an author in the file's properties, and used a different name as the person who edited it	The author we typed
Typed no author, and exported a new document	Word's own user name setting
Same as the first row, but turned "Document properties" off	No Author entry

The name of the person who edited the file, which the Word file stores separately, did not appear in the PDF in any of these tests. The PDF also named Word as Creator and Producer and carried the creation and modification times, whichever way we set the box.

The second row is the one that surprises people. If you never typed an author, Word fills the author in from its own user name setting when it makes the document. The PDF then repeats it. That name may well be a real one.

How to leave it out

If you export from Word, clear the "Document properties" box in the PDF options before you save. Microsoft's page about saving to PDF lists it among the options in that dialog. That removed the Author and Title in our test, but not the app name or the times.

A PDF that already exists is a different case: the name is inside it, and the Word file is no longer involved. For that, you check the PDF itself.

What we did not test

We tested one version of Word, on Windows. Other programs that make PDFs may fill these entries in differently, and we did not test them. We did not look for every other place a PDF can store a name; the Word PDFs in our tests had no separate metadata block.

Check the PDF before you send it

Drop the PDF into Check Before Send. It lists the document information it finds, with the actual values, and you choose what to remove. It writes a new copy and runs a second scan on that copy. "Verified not found" means the second scan found nothing, not that the file is guaranteed clean.

The file is read inside your browser and is not uploaded; the Trust Center explains how to confirm that. For the Word side of the same question, see how to see who last edited a Word document, or browse the other guides.

Sources

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